No other anguish is quite like that of the procrastinator. He knows
that the job has to get done, that putting it off just makes it harder,
that the worry is worse than the work. And yet he can't ... quite ...
get ... started.

Procrastination seems built into human nature – the ancient Roman
orator Cicero fretted about it, as did the Greek historian Thucydides.

Today, 95 per cent of people say that they sometimes procrastinate.

The real problem, though, is the 20 per cent of us who qualify as chronic
procrastinators. These are people who procrastinate so routinely that
their work, finances or personal relationships suffer because of it.

At its worst, procrastination is a form of self-destructive behaviour,
like drug addiction or chronic gambling. Like them, its origins are
mysterious, and its treatment difficult.

Now a new analysis of the psychological literature by a University
of Calgary psychologist could help untangle what makes so many of us
put off until tomorrow what we really should do today.

Piers Steel has just published a mammoth review of the scientific literature
on procrastination in the journal Psychological Bulletin, and his conclusions
are at odds with some conventional ideas.

"Some of them are dead wrong," Steel says.

His research contradicts one major theory, which is that procrastinators
suffer from anxiety and so have a harder time facing a difficult task.

Steel looked at the literature and found that statistically there's
very little correlation between anxiety and a tendency to procrastinate.

The same with the flattering idea that procrastinators are also perfectionists,
people who care so much about doing it right that they can't bear to
get started. Again, Steel found no correlation.

What he did find is that procrastinators are less confident that they
can handle a given task. They're also more impulsive and less conscientious
overall.

"Whether you believe you can or you believe you can't, you're
right," Steel says."Some of these old wives' tales bear out.
People who believe they can are less likely to procrastinate."

Steel's paper is unlikely to be the final word on procrastination.
But it's important because it's the best attempt so far to analyze hundreds
of psychological studies that have been conducted over a period of decades.

Part of the problem of procrastination is defining it in the first
place. We all have dozens of things we could be doing at any particular
moment, and some of them have to be put off.

Prioritizing turns into procrastination when we know the job needs
to be done, we know we'll be worse off if we don't do it, we intend
to do it – and we still don't do it. It is profoundly irrational
behaviour, and its very irrationality makes it tough for procrastinators
and psychologists alike to understand.

Samuel Johnson, the prolific 18th-century writer and lexicographer,
admitted to procrastinating himself, and described the remorse familiar
to any procrastinator: "I could not forbear to reproach myself
for having so long neglected what was unavoidably to be done, and of
which every moment's idleness increased the difficulty."

But he also puzzled over what made people procrastinate when it was
so clearly against their best interests. "The folly of allowing
ourselves to delay what we know cannot be finally escaped is one of
the general weaknesses," he concluded.

Steel thinks procrastination is probably an even bigger problem today.

We have more readily available distractions, like the Internet and
computer games. (Steel says he's had problems with computer games himself.)
And many jobs are becoming more self-structured, which means it's increasingly
up to us to impose our own work goals and deadlines.

The harm caused by procrastination can be immense. Steel points to
a study by the tax-preparation firm H&R Block that says putting
off doing their taxes costs U.S. citizens an average of $400 each because
of errors due to the last-minute rush.

Even more irrationally, 70 per cent of patients suffering from glaucoma
don't get around to using their eye drops regularly, which could potentially
result in blindness.

Fifty per cent of heart attack patients don't manage to make the lifestyle
changes that could save their lives.

"On the one hand, it's easy to trivialize procrastination. We
joke about it," says Timothy A. Pychyl, a psychologist at Carleton
University who studies procrastination.

"But procrastination is self-defeating. It's a breakdown in volitional
action. I have an intention and I'm not following through on it. You're
not able to follow through on what you want to do."

Over the years, psychologists have come up with a lot of ideas about
what makes people procrastinate. In addition to anxiety and perfectionism,
some suggested that procrastinators were self-sabotaging, hostile and
rebellious, or depressed.

But for Steel, procrastination can be explained by an insight borrowed
from behavioural economics called hyperbolic discounting. This is the
tendency to value near-term rewards more than long-term ones. For instance,
some people will choose a payoff of $50 today over $100 tomorrow.

Steel combined hyperbolic discounting with a theory of motivation called
expectancy theory, and came up with something he calls temporal motivational
theory (TMT). It boils down to this:

Utility = E x V / Gamma D

Utility is the desirability of getting something done. E is expectancy,
or confidence. V is the value of the job, and includes not only its
importance but also its unpleasantness. Gamma stands for how prone a
person is to delay doing things. And D means delay, or how far away
the consequences of doing, or not doing, the task are.

The bigger the top number compared to the bottom, the less likely a
task will be put off. So if you expect to do well at a job (E), and
it's a pleasant thing to do (V), and you're not prone to being delayed
by distractions (Gamma), and it has to be done right away (D), you're
not likely to procrastinate.

If you expect to fail at a difficult task and you're easily distracted
and it doesn't have to be done for quite awhile, you're going to procrastinate.

"It's a little bit unsettling that human nature can be reduced
to an equation," Steel says. "But you can show that pretty
much every major view of behaviour can be reduced to that."

"It makes an important contribution by summing it up," says
Pychyl. "It doesn't mean that he's captured the whole phenomenon.
There are elements we still don't understand about these self-defeating
behaviours."

Pychyl thinks it's still too early to rule out anxiety, perfectionism,
depression or other causes that have been suggested for procrastination.

William J. Knaus, a psychologist and author of Do It Now!, a procrastination
self-help book, says it's a complex behaviour that's far from being
understood. But he insists procrastinators can change.

"It's a challenge," he says, "but it's doable. We have
enough of the tools now so that anyone who is serious about making strides
and improvements can do so."

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